Dan Ariely had an interesting column in the latest issue of HBR, talking about how Chile forces its citizens to save money and annuitize their pensions:
When employees reach retirement, their savings are converted into annuities. The government auctions off the rights to annuitize retirees in groups of 250,000…
Institutionally, Chile has cracked an age-old problem with annuities. It’s risky business to predict how long people will live, so insurance companies charge a high premium to cover that risk, which makes for an inefficient market. Annuities also suffer from an adverse selection problem… By pooling the risk, the Chilean government makes annuities an attractive business with more competition and better prices. And since everyone is forced to annuitize, the adverse selection problem simply disappears.
This is rather clever, if it’s true. But a Chilean technocrat, Axel Christensen, responded on the HBR website, saying that Ariely misunderstood what he’d been told. The groups of 250,000 are allocated to fund managers, he said, not annuity providers.
At retirement, Chileans may choose between a fixed inflation-adjusted annuity offered by an insurance company or a variable annuity from by the same company that managed their retirement account. It is an individual decision, with no pooling as you stated. The insurance companies have to bid for the contributor´s savings that increases competition, but the system does has its flaws, like the adverse selection you identified.
This doesn’t clear things up a lot: it seems to me that if you have to pick an annuity, then adverse-selection problems are minimized even if there’s no pooling at all. After all, the problem with adverse selection is that people who buy annuities will live longer than people who don’t buy annuities. If everybody buys an annuity, there isn’t a problem.
And when Ariely republished the column on his blog after Christensen had made his comment, the column was unchanged. I don’t know what to make of that: maybe Ariely didn’t see the comment, or he thinks that for some reason it’s unimportant.
Ariely says that schemes like Chile’s wouldn’t go down well in the U.S., where Americans would consider it “heavy-handed and limiting”. I daresay he’s right. But it would be great if there were some way of allowing people to voluntarily commit to annuitizing their pension fund upon retirement. One of the problems with pension funds is that nobody actually needs some big multi-million-dollar nest egg at age 65. What they need, instead, is a healthy income in retirement. But converting a nest egg into an income is non-trivial. You want to maximize your income by spending principal as well as interest, but you also want to make sure you don’t run out of money if you live a long time.
Annuities solve that problem, but they do suffer from adverse selection: people who buy them live longer than people who don’t, and so insurance companies have to make allowances for that. If everybody in a big pool was committed to annuitizing, then the insurance company could ensure that people who died at a younger age would help to subsidize those who live a very long time — as should happen in any good pension system.
This, indeed, is one of the central problems with defined-contribution pensions rather than defined-benefit pensions. When we “save up for retirement”, we’re conflating two things: the savings, on the one hand, and our retirement income, on the other. If we die before we retire, then our retirement income is zero, but the savings are still there, and the only retiree they’re likely to benefit is our spouse, if we have one.
Are there any numbers on the amount of money which is paid in to Social Security against which no benefits are ever drawn? I’d include people working in the U.S. on temporary work visas, here, as well as people who die before retirement while unmarried. On top of that, of course, people who die early in retirement end up taking out of the system much less than they put in. And the benefits of that cross-subsidy accrue to the long-lived, who need money to live on in their 90s and beyond. It’s a humane and sensible system: the living need money more than the dead do.
Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a way of replicating anything like this on a voluntary basis. I could invest my retirement savings in a fund which automatically annuitizes with everybody else in the fund when I turn 65, for instance. But if I get cancer when I’m 64, I’ll surely move those savings into cash instead of meekly accepting a short-lived income.
So the Chilean system of mandating annuitization for certain types of retirement assets makes sense to me, if indeed there is a mandate there. Maybe people could have a choice: they can invest pre-tax dollars in retirement funds which are forced to annuitize, but if they want to retain control over whether or not they annuitize, they have to invest only post-tax dollars.
And then, of course, we’d have to look to see whether the insurance companies actually improved their annuity rates significantly in response to the new mandate. Is there any data from Chile on that? All of this government interference might make sense in theory, but the real world is nearly always much messier.
This was probably inevitable: the minute that Dodd-Frank cracked down on the fees charged by credit cards aimed at students, some other bright financial innovation would crop up. This time, a debit card aimed at students. Which carries lots of fees. Ylan Mui reports that a company called Higher One has started signing up colleges around the country, taking on the burden of providing cash to students. In return, it gets lots of fees:
Students say several of the fees associated with Higher One’s card are particularly irksome, including the $19 inactivity fee, a 50-cent charge for using a PIN to make a purchase rather than a signature, and a $2.50 fee for using other banks’ ATMs…
Higher One said that only 1 percent of customers have been charged an inactivity fee and that more than half are charged the 50-cent fee only once. All fees are listed on Higher One’s Web site, along with tips on avoiding them.
“We have a big effort with educating students on how to use the account,” Smith said. “We’re very passionate about financial literacy.”
If the fees are listed on Higher One’s website, they’re not exactly prominent. I did find this page, eventually, via this blog entry, but it just says that “when you swipe & sign, you won’t be charged the PIN-based transaction fee”. I haven’t been able to find a page showing a 50-cent transaction fee anywhere*, although I did manage to find this page, showing a $25 fee for domestic wire transfers and a $50 fee for international wire transfers. “Higher One offers less costly alternatives for transferring funds”, it says, without giving any indication what they might be; I suspect that what they’re talking about is transfers to or from people who have already registered somehow with Higher One.
It should go without saying that any firm which is “very passionate about financial literacy” would encourage, rather than penalize, simple, cheap and safe PIN-debit transactions. It would not give students a debit card and then tell them that if they want to avoid fees they should select the “credit” option rather than the “debit” option when they come to pay.
And I can’t think of any good reason to charge a $19 inactivity fee to people who haven’t used their cards in 9 months.
The fact is that students are often very naive when it comes to money, and it’s easy to gouge them once or twice before they learn that banks are not necessarily on their side. If you can get your card accepted by a majority of freshmen every year, and then come up with all manner of weird fees to hit them with, that’s a great way of making money out of ignorance.
Meanwhile, all students should have a bank account: giving them a debit card instead only serves to maximize the number of unbanked students. So while I’m sure cards like this are attractive to colleges, it would be great if either the colleges or else the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau started being a lot more critical of them. Prepaid cards only ever make sense if the alternative is being completely unbanked; that should not ever be the case for students.
*At Southern Oregon University, Higher One agreed to waive the 50-cent PIN-debit charge, but only if there was a simultaneous “swipe-and-sign” campaign. If the campaign is unsuccessful and students do the sensible thing by using PIN debit, then the university can be charged $2 per student for “PIN fee elimination”.
Update: Higher One’s Donald Smith responds:
Higher One was founded 10 years ago by three college students (undergraduates at the time) who were looking for streamlining the way financial aid refunds were distributed to students. Today we work with more than 675 campuses across the country, have a 97% client retention rating, and an A+ rating with the BBB.
The OneAccount is Higher One’s optional, no minimum balance, no monthly fee, FDIC-Insured checking account created by students for students. We do not offer a stored value card. We are very open with our fee schedule. We post it on every program website for all to access, explain each fee, discuss how to avoid each fee, and provide students with a web page that tells them how to use the account for free (which you’ve already found). Because of this, we believe that our customers pay less than half the amount in fees that the average bank checking account customer pays per year.
Two of the fees you referenced in your blog are the PIN fee and the Abandoned Account Fee. The PIN fee is easily avoided by choosing a signature based transaction at the checkout. The majority of students uses it in this manner and is in turn protected by MasterCard’s Zero Liability Policy against fraudulent charges (a safer way of purchasing than a PIN based transaction). We do not have an inactivity fee on our fee schedule – we don’t penalize students who do not use their accounts. We do have an Abandoned Account Fee of up to $19, for those who have abandoned their accounts, but this has been charged to less than 1% of all OneAccount holders in our company’s history because of our proactive outreach plan.
Higher One offers no instruments of credit. As a matter of fact, we’re generally in favor of initiatives restricting students’ access to credit cards and promoting financial literacy. This is why we offer a full range of financial literacy resources along with the services we provide.
I particularly dislike the implication, here, that PIN-based transactions are unsafe. They’re not; they’re just less lucrative, in terms of interchange fees, than signature-based transactions.
Juan Williams: Fox <b>News</b> Lets 'Black Guy With A Hispanic Name' Host <b>...</b>
Juan Williams said Tuesday that he's still upset about his firing from NPR, and added that NPR does not understand the Fox News culture or audience. In an interview with Baltimore Sun columnist David Zurawik, Williams said he remains ...
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FAIR Blog » Blog Archive » Juan Williams, Fox <b>News</b> Liberal
It's not totally clear what he means by that, but Williams does a pretty good job as a Fox News Liberal-- i.e., someone willing to attack left-liberal groups and leaders while doing very little to promote an actual left-leaning ...
bench craft company complaints
bench craft company complaints
Juan Williams: Fox <b>News</b> Lets 'Black Guy With A Hispanic Name' Host <b>...</b>
Juan Williams said Tuesday that he's still upset about his firing from NPR, and added that NPR does not understand the Fox News culture or audience. In an interview with Baltimore Sun columnist David Zurawik, Williams said he remains ...
BREAKING <b>NEWS</b>: James Cameron's Next Films Are 'Avatar 2′ & '3′ For <b>...</b>
BREAKING NEWS: James Cameron's Next Films Are 'Avatar 2' & '3' BREAKING NEWS: James Cameron's Next Films … TV Pitch Season Coming To An End � Official: 'The Hobbit' Stays In New Zealand � Michael Jackson Song 'Thriller' In Center Of Pic ...
FAIR Blog » Blog Archive » Juan Williams, Fox <b>News</b> Liberal
It's not totally clear what he means by that, but Williams does a pretty good job as a Fox News Liberal-- i.e., someone willing to attack left-liberal groups and leaders while doing very little to promote an actual left-leaning ...
bench craft company complaints bench craft company complaints
Dan Ariely had an interesting column in the latest issue of HBR, talking about how Chile forces its citizens to save money and annuitize their pensions:
When employees reach retirement, their savings are converted into annuities. The government auctions off the rights to annuitize retirees in groups of 250,000…
Institutionally, Chile has cracked an age-old problem with annuities. It’s risky business to predict how long people will live, so insurance companies charge a high premium to cover that risk, which makes for an inefficient market. Annuities also suffer from an adverse selection problem… By pooling the risk, the Chilean government makes annuities an attractive business with more competition and better prices. And since everyone is forced to annuitize, the adverse selection problem simply disappears.
This is rather clever, if it’s true. But a Chilean technocrat, Axel Christensen, responded on the HBR website, saying that Ariely misunderstood what he’d been told. The groups of 250,000 are allocated to fund managers, he said, not annuity providers.
At retirement, Chileans may choose between a fixed inflation-adjusted annuity offered by an insurance company or a variable annuity from by the same company that managed their retirement account. It is an individual decision, with no pooling as you stated. The insurance companies have to bid for the contributor´s savings that increases competition, but the system does has its flaws, like the adverse selection you identified.
This doesn’t clear things up a lot: it seems to me that if you have to pick an annuity, then adverse-selection problems are minimized even if there’s no pooling at all. After all, the problem with adverse selection is that people who buy annuities will live longer than people who don’t buy annuities. If everybody buys an annuity, there isn’t a problem.
And when Ariely republished the column on his blog after Christensen had made his comment, the column was unchanged. I don’t know what to make of that: maybe Ariely didn’t see the comment, or he thinks that for some reason it’s unimportant.
Ariely says that schemes like Chile’s wouldn’t go down well in the U.S., where Americans would consider it “heavy-handed and limiting”. I daresay he’s right. But it would be great if there were some way of allowing people to voluntarily commit to annuitizing their pension fund upon retirement. One of the problems with pension funds is that nobody actually needs some big multi-million-dollar nest egg at age 65. What they need, instead, is a healthy income in retirement. But converting a nest egg into an income is non-trivial. You want to maximize your income by spending principal as well as interest, but you also want to make sure you don’t run out of money if you live a long time.
Annuities solve that problem, but they do suffer from adverse selection: people who buy them live longer than people who don’t, and so insurance companies have to make allowances for that. If everybody in a big pool was committed to annuitizing, then the insurance company could ensure that people who died at a younger age would help to subsidize those who live a very long time — as should happen in any good pension system.
This, indeed, is one of the central problems with defined-contribution pensions rather than defined-benefit pensions. When we “save up for retirement”, we’re conflating two things: the savings, on the one hand, and our retirement income, on the other. If we die before we retire, then our retirement income is zero, but the savings are still there, and the only retiree they’re likely to benefit is our spouse, if we have one.
Are there any numbers on the amount of money which is paid in to Social Security against which no benefits are ever drawn? I’d include people working in the U.S. on temporary work visas, here, as well as people who die before retirement while unmarried. On top of that, of course, people who die early in retirement end up taking out of the system much less than they put in. And the benefits of that cross-subsidy accrue to the long-lived, who need money to live on in their 90s and beyond. It’s a humane and sensible system: the living need money more than the dead do.
Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a way of replicating anything like this on a voluntary basis. I could invest my retirement savings in a fund which automatically annuitizes with everybody else in the fund when I turn 65, for instance. But if I get cancer when I’m 64, I’ll surely move those savings into cash instead of meekly accepting a short-lived income.
So the Chilean system of mandating annuitization for certain types of retirement assets makes sense to me, if indeed there is a mandate there. Maybe people could have a choice: they can invest pre-tax dollars in retirement funds which are forced to annuitize, but if they want to retain control over whether or not they annuitize, they have to invest only post-tax dollars.
And then, of course, we’d have to look to see whether the insurance companies actually improved their annuity rates significantly in response to the new mandate. Is there any data from Chile on that? All of this government interference might make sense in theory, but the real world is nearly always much messier.
This was probably inevitable: the minute that Dodd-Frank cracked down on the fees charged by credit cards aimed at students, some other bright financial innovation would crop up. This time, a debit card aimed at students. Which carries lots of fees. Ylan Mui reports that a company called Higher One has started signing up colleges around the country, taking on the burden of providing cash to students. In return, it gets lots of fees:
Students say several of the fees associated with Higher One’s card are particularly irksome, including the $19 inactivity fee, a 50-cent charge for using a PIN to make a purchase rather than a signature, and a $2.50 fee for using other banks’ ATMs…
Higher One said that only 1 percent of customers have been charged an inactivity fee and that more than half are charged the 50-cent fee only once. All fees are listed on Higher One’s Web site, along with tips on avoiding them.
“We have a big effort with educating students on how to use the account,” Smith said. “We’re very passionate about financial literacy.”
If the fees are listed on Higher One’s website, they’re not exactly prominent. I did find this page, eventually, via this blog entry, but it just says that “when you swipe & sign, you won’t be charged the PIN-based transaction fee”. I haven’t been able to find a page showing a 50-cent transaction fee anywhere*, although I did manage to find this page, showing a $25 fee for domestic wire transfers and a $50 fee for international wire transfers. “Higher One offers less costly alternatives for transferring funds”, it says, without giving any indication what they might be; I suspect that what they’re talking about is transfers to or from people who have already registered somehow with Higher One.
It should go without saying that any firm which is “very passionate about financial literacy” would encourage, rather than penalize, simple, cheap and safe PIN-debit transactions. It would not give students a debit card and then tell them that if they want to avoid fees they should select the “credit” option rather than the “debit” option when they come to pay.
And I can’t think of any good reason to charge a $19 inactivity fee to people who haven’t used their cards in 9 months.
The fact is that students are often very naive when it comes to money, and it’s easy to gouge them once or twice before they learn that banks are not necessarily on their side. If you can get your card accepted by a majority of freshmen every year, and then come up with all manner of weird fees to hit them with, that’s a great way of making money out of ignorance.
Meanwhile, all students should have a bank account: giving them a debit card instead only serves to maximize the number of unbanked students. So while I’m sure cards like this are attractive to colleges, it would be great if either the colleges or else the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau started being a lot more critical of them. Prepaid cards only ever make sense if the alternative is being completely unbanked; that should not ever be the case for students.
*At Southern Oregon University, Higher One agreed to waive the 50-cent PIN-debit charge, but only if there was a simultaneous “swipe-and-sign” campaign. If the campaign is unsuccessful and students do the sensible thing by using PIN debit, then the university can be charged $2 per student for “PIN fee elimination”.
Update: Higher One’s Donald Smith responds:
Higher One was founded 10 years ago by three college students (undergraduates at the time) who were looking for streamlining the way financial aid refunds were distributed to students. Today we work with more than 675 campuses across the country, have a 97% client retention rating, and an A+ rating with the BBB.
The OneAccount is Higher One’s optional, no minimum balance, no monthly fee, FDIC-Insured checking account created by students for students. We do not offer a stored value card. We are very open with our fee schedule. We post it on every program website for all to access, explain each fee, discuss how to avoid each fee, and provide students with a web page that tells them how to use the account for free (which you’ve already found). Because of this, we believe that our customers pay less than half the amount in fees that the average bank checking account customer pays per year.
Two of the fees you referenced in your blog are the PIN fee and the Abandoned Account Fee. The PIN fee is easily avoided by choosing a signature based transaction at the checkout. The majority of students uses it in this manner and is in turn protected by MasterCard’s Zero Liability Policy against fraudulent charges (a safer way of purchasing than a PIN based transaction). We do not have an inactivity fee on our fee schedule – we don’t penalize students who do not use their accounts. We do have an Abandoned Account Fee of up to $19, for those who have abandoned their accounts, but this has been charged to less than 1% of all OneAccount holders in our company’s history because of our proactive outreach plan.
Higher One offers no instruments of credit. As a matter of fact, we’re generally in favor of initiatives restricting students’ access to credit cards and promoting financial literacy. This is why we offer a full range of financial literacy resources along with the services we provide.
I particularly dislike the implication, here, that PIN-based transactions are unsafe. They’re not; they’re just less lucrative, in terms of interchange fees, than signature-based transactions.
bench craft company complaints
Juan Williams: Fox <b>News</b> Lets 'Black Guy With A Hispanic Name' Host <b>...</b>
Juan Williams said Tuesday that he's still upset about his firing from NPR, and added that NPR does not understand the Fox News culture or audience. In an interview with Baltimore Sun columnist David Zurawik, Williams said he remains ...
BREAKING <b>NEWS</b>: James Cameron's Next Films Are 'Avatar 2′ & '3′ For <b>...</b>
BREAKING NEWS: James Cameron's Next Films Are 'Avatar 2' & '3' BREAKING NEWS: James Cameron's Next Films … TV Pitch Season Coming To An End � Official: 'The Hobbit' Stays In New Zealand � Michael Jackson Song 'Thriller' In Center Of Pic ...
FAIR Blog » Blog Archive » Juan Williams, Fox <b>News</b> Liberal
It's not totally clear what he means by that, but Williams does a pretty good job as a Fox News Liberal-- i.e., someone willing to attack left-liberal groups and leaders while doing very little to promote an actual left-leaning ...
bench craft company complaints bench craft company complaints
Juan Williams: Fox <b>News</b> Lets 'Black Guy With A Hispanic Name' Host <b>...</b>
Juan Williams said Tuesday that he's still upset about his firing from NPR, and added that NPR does not understand the Fox News culture or audience. In an interview with Baltimore Sun columnist David Zurawik, Williams said he remains ...
BREAKING <b>NEWS</b>: James Cameron's Next Films Are 'Avatar 2′ & '3′ For <b>...</b>
BREAKING NEWS: James Cameron's Next Films Are 'Avatar 2' & '3' BREAKING NEWS: James Cameron's Next Films … TV Pitch Season Coming To An End � Official: 'The Hobbit' Stays In New Zealand � Michael Jackson Song 'Thriller' In Center Of Pic ...
FAIR Blog » Blog Archive » Juan Williams, Fox <b>News</b> Liberal
It's not totally clear what he means by that, but Williams does a pretty good job as a Fox News Liberal-- i.e., someone willing to attack left-liberal groups and leaders while doing very little to promote an actual left-leaning ...
bench craft company complaints bench craft company complaints
Juan Williams: Fox <b>News</b> Lets 'Black Guy With A Hispanic Name' Host <b>...</b>
Juan Williams said Tuesday that he's still upset about his firing from NPR, and added that NPR does not understand the Fox News culture or audience. In an interview with Baltimore Sun columnist David Zurawik, Williams said he remains ...
BREAKING <b>NEWS</b>: James Cameron's Next Films Are 'Avatar 2′ & '3′ For <b>...</b>
BREAKING NEWS: James Cameron's Next Films Are 'Avatar 2' & '3' BREAKING NEWS: James Cameron's Next Films … TV Pitch Season Coming To An End � Official: 'The Hobbit' Stays In New Zealand � Michael Jackson Song 'Thriller' In Center Of Pic ...
FAIR Blog » Blog Archive » Juan Williams, Fox <b>News</b> Liberal
It's not totally clear what he means by that, but Williams does a pretty good job as a Fox News Liberal-- i.e., someone willing to attack left-liberal groups and leaders while doing very little to promote an actual left-leaning ...
bench craft company complaints bench craft company complaints
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